--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@...> wrote: <snip> > It is OK if a scientist says something like TM, or some other > form of meditation, like mindfulness, seems to result in more > of a 'good' neurotransmitter in the brain. But if a scientist > says that certain specific functions in the brain produce well > known spiritual experiences and that these experiences can be > thus manipulated experimentally, this is anathema because it > looks as if spiritual experience is just materialistic, > mechanistic - the glory on high of the majesty of the gods and > the ultimate reality is suddenly reduced to hardware and > software, of a meat factory producing the crowning and supreme > sublimity.
I'm too busy to respond fully to your meaty post at the moment; hopefully I can get back to it in a day or two. But I wanted to make one point about the above (not related to the Sacks piece, really): We do tend to think that meditation, or psilocybin or other methodologies, "produce" spiritual experiences. But another possibility is that all they do is damp down what gets in the way of those experiences, that we would be experiencing a more complete reality 24/7 if our brains didn't normally filter most of it out in the interests of allowing us to focus on our immediate survival. This ties in with some things MMY has said about higher consciousness being "normal," and also with what Jay Latham quotes him as saying about the dawning of Brahman Consciousness, that one isn't capable at first of doing anything more than lying in bed, until one begins to get used to the state. I could run on about this for quite awhile, but I have to get back to work!
